Grammy Awards 2013 – winners

With a star-stuffed evening heavy on performances – it’s hard to know where to start when compiling the hottest Grammy Awards moments.
Was it the surprise rainstorm during Fun.’s “Carry On”? Jack White showing up with both of his solo bands? Or watching Drake score his first Grammy after a dozen nominations and celebrate by dropping his “Started From the Bottom” video?
As far as awards go, it was a big night for Fun., who scooped up Best New Artist as well as Song of the Year for “We Are Young” – not to mention Mumford & Sons, who snagged Album of the Year for Babel and Gotye, who snagged Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Somebody That I Used to Know” and Best Alternative Music Album for “Making Mirrors”.
The Black Keys did pretty well, too, with wins for Best Rock Album for El Camino, Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance for “Lonely Boy” and Producer of the Year, Non-Classical for guitarist Dan Auerbach, while Skrillex once again ran the EDM categories, with three wins.

Grammy Awards 2013 - winners
Grammys 2013.

High-energy arena-folk act Mumford & Sons triumphed over relative newcomers such as Frank Ocean and Fun. to win the most prestigious Grammy prize, album of the year, for its “Babel.” The turned-to-11 folk of “Babel” was the only album of the year nominee currently in the top 10.
“Babel” (at No. 7 heading into the Grammys) has sold more than 1,7 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. The sophomore album from Mumford & Sons was released on Glassnote Records in September and at the time had the biggest debut sales week of 2012, selling approximately 600.000 copies.
“Babel” would soon be eclipsed by Taylor Swift’s “Red,” which sold more than 1 million copies when it debuted. Ultimately “Babel” finished 2012 as the year’s fourth-bestselling album.
Though Mumford & Sons have released just two albums, the band’s Grammy ties run deep. While the act was a slow-building success story long before it appeared on the Grammys as Bob Dylan’s backing band in 2011, that awards-show moment catapulted the group to grander, mainstream heights.
Keyboardist Ben Lovett earlier singled out that performance as a pivotal moment for the group. “I think it introduced us to people who watch (awards) shows the way we grew up watching music on TV” – he said. “It makes sense that it would widen our audience. But we weren’t thinking about that at the time.”

Going into the Grammy Awards, six different artists had six nominations each. But when the show finally wrapped up on Sunday night, the Grammys still didn’t know which artist it liked best, as several different acts ended up picking up multiple awards.
The big winner, technically, was Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. In addition to winning three Grammys as a member of the alternative rock duo, he won an additional trophy for Producer of the Year, bringing his total to four. The group did not win in any of the major categories, though, despite a slew of nominations.
Artists who won three Grammys include Gotye and the duo of Jay-Z and Kanye West. Double winners included Fun., Frank Ocean and Mumford & Sons. Those last three acts had been heavily nominated going into the show, but only Fun. landed two of the top awards: Song of the Year for “We Are Young” and Best New Artist.
Accepting for “We Are Young,” lead singer Nate Ruess joked: “I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote the chorus of that song. If this is in HD, you can see our faces and you can see we are not very young!”
The band noted that they’d actually been doing their thing for 12 years, and thanked their families who’d been supporting them all that time. Guitarist Jack Antonoff’s girlfriend Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO series “Girls,” was seen in the audience cheering for her man, just as he cheered for her when she won at the Golden Globes last month. When the band returned to the stage to accept the Best New Artist trophy, Ruess said that he wanted the other members of the band to make the speech because he “had to pee” so badly.
Gotye, whose momentum seemed to have slowed a bit going into the awards, ended up with three Grammys, including the prestigious Record of the Year trophy for “Somebody that I Used to Know.” Gotye, who was thrilled to accept the trophy from one of his musical inspirations — Prince — noted that there were “so many incredible songs” in the category, adding: “Thank you to everybody who puts great energy into the world making music. I feel unworthy being up here but thank you, all musicians.”
Album of the Year went, surprisingly, to “Babel” by British folk-rockers Mumford & Sons, whose only other trophy Sunday night was for Best Longform Music Video. We wish we could tell you what lead singer Marcus Mumford said when he accepted the award from Adele, but he cursed so much that most of his comments were bleeped out.

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